Arrival

Blogging is going to be a bit sporadic and pretty unsophisticated as I'm pretty much relying on mobile devices, so there will likely be a scattering of random photos with a short caption and then slightly longer posts like this one. Neither of which will have much in the way of fancy formatting.

So we arrived, obviously. With a minimum of fuss really. The flight was long but uneventful with not much in the way of turbulence or anything. The food was typical airline food, I mean they try but your taste buds just aren't designed to function at those altitudes. The slightly weird thing about the food was the scheduling. We started off with dinner , followed by lunch and ended with breakfast just before landing.

Now I don't deal with the concept of time zones particularly well, I deal with the concept of the date line even less. I knew that Tokyo was 13 hours out and somehow the day was different. I tried but I couldn't figure out if Tokyo time is ahead, behind or what, let alone what meal my body should have been expecting. Basically I turned up at the airport and knew that I was going to get on a plane and it would take me to Tokyo, sometime, some day.

And it did, thankfully.

Once we had made it off the plane we navigated immigration and customs with zero hassle. Our bags were amongst the last to arrive, naturally! Now to try and make it to our apartment. We headed towards the Monorail where a nice lady was obviously on the lookout for dumb foreigners and kindly pressed the appropriate buttons on the machine and gave us our tickets.

That was the easy part. The next stage involved a taxi, shouldn't be too big a problem I hear you say.

Well yes and no. Finding a taxi is easy, finding the address not so much.

Japanese addresses are, well, weird! Buildings are numbered in the order they are built. So number 73 might be next to number 9. RTH with his awesome language skills managed to get us to the right general area but then it would seem the taxi driver gave up and we found ourselves having to walk the final 10 minutes or so, uphill and dragging large cases.

Hot, tired and sweaty we located the building and met the airBnB owner. Thoughtfully he had arrived with a bag of groceries to do us through the night; milk, bread, eggs and being and Aussie, beer!

The apartment was exactly as described on the site, small by Toronto standards, roomy and spacious by Japanese. A little creative re-arranging and our stuff was stowed safely away and we settled in for our first night.